The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)

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[–] 289 points 9 months ago (49 children)

Please fucking crash I want to be able to buy basic computing hardware again

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  • [–] 70 points 9 months ago (38 children)

    Since OpenAI just announced the possibility of bankruptcy, it's definitely coming. It's going to be wild for whichever idiot in charge at MS to go down in history as the man who ruined one of the most powerful and integral companies on earth.

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  • [–] 36 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    Wait, where? I wanna read and savour it.

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  • [–] 24 points 9 months ago*

    In her new letter to OpenAI, Senator Warren requested additional information regarding OpenAI’s business model, its plans to fulfill its spending commitments, and its appeal to the White House for taxpayer support by February 13, 2026.

    There is big shit show going on.

    https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-presses-openai-ceo-on-spending-commitments-and-bailout-requests-after-cfo-suggests-government-backstop

    edit: original letter https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_openai_from_senator_warren.pdf

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (29 children)

    lol they havnt even put the ads in yet

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  • [–] 19 points 9 months ago* (28 children)

    They don't have a product with any actual value or use cases. The ads aren't going to reverse that. If it were that simple then they would have been able to make profit with their subscription model.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    How would that even work as well? The ads will be in the website, doesn't most stuff run through API calls? If you force everyone to start paying per call, the business model falls apart instantly.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    API calls are already only paid, no?

    I'm guessing the ads will be embedded in the answers of the free users (like: it will add to the prompt something like "and don't forget to plug the sponsor, ridge wallet")

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Oh actually are they? I admit I assumed they were doing the standard bullshit of everything is free to get you integrated, then they start charging. Actually maybe that already happened and this is the result of that.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (24 children)

    I think we’re quite a long way off before they actually crash and burn, if they ever do. We have no idea how much money the ads will inject and they also receive significant government contracts and will probably get a lot more going forward

    If the market can pretend Tesla is worth so much i think it can easily sustain AI for many years

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago (23 children)

    It's already been several years. Tesla had an actual product that people wanted. Yes, they've been doing their best of late to torpedo their market share and brand name but at one point they were doing what they set out to do. Open AI has never done what they said they would do.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    Note that Tesla was clearly a viable business, I don't see the justification for it being 3 times the value of ford, gm, Toyota, and Honda all put together.

    Generally people are not challenging the fundamental possibility of these as viable business, just that they don't make sense at their valuations.

    Though I'll agree that open ai particularly should get some skepticism. To the extent that actionable business models might emerge, I don't see openai actually in a position to be a big party of any of it. Microsoft and Anthropic seem to mostly own business revenue, ChatGPT is generally not even providing the models people select when they are able to choose.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (21 children)

    Kinda but also not entirely. I know a lot of people who use ChatGPT and other AIs at work and it does basically exactly what they want and just gets better

    I’m not a proponent but the naysayer doomers are almost as wrong as the tech evangelists

    Is it overvalued? Sure

    Is it worthless? Absolutely not

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (20 children)

    That's cool. I have yet to find a use case for AI. Am I doing it wrong or are they just bad with computers?

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I am with gustofwind here. I use AI to help me quickly draft up mindless policies, then read through it and edit it where needed. It is a lot faster than any typing I can do.

    I also use it to help me find configs for stuff I deploy, but I make sure it attaches the source link for me, so I can read the original source docs and keep a sane approach to what I am doing.

    Again, I also think it is way overvalued, but to say it has not helped me build successful stuff over the past 2 years would be a lie. My 2c

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    I think my and many others’ problem with your use case is the mindless policy part, not the genAI part.

    We need more mindless policies in this world like we need measles and more holes in our heads, but that’s all this shop is making, busy work for itself to summarize for the same lazy morons who generated it.

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  • [–] -2 points 9 months ago (17 children)

    Yes, why do you care about the pointless corporate crap you produce . Ai slop is the desired result you are just letting your pride get in the way.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (16 children)

    Products and services have been dropping in quality well before ai slop

    You overestimate the quality of acceptable work in many industries. AI and a little human editing and oversight is perfectly capable of producing legitimate work product.

    The real problem is capitalism driving everything to shit and that really has nothing to do with ai influenced workflows

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (14 children)

    I went from Windows laptop and Netflix and Hulu to a Linux desktop for a home server running Immich, Mealie, Jellyfin, and the Arr suite in docker containers. All proxied on Cloudflare for remote access. I would never have been able to do that without the use of ChatGPT. I had no knowledge of software development, Linux, networking, etc at all. If you know how to query, AI can be a huge aid in learning. It's helping me brush up on my Italian right now too since I haven't spoken it in 5 years.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Tbh it’s not much different than search engines. You need to learn how to use them and when it’s appropriate to do so…it’s basically a skill issue 🤷‍♀️

    Reminds me of when search engines first arrived and we were taught very early in school how library research works and then when to use digital academic databases vs regular search engines or just hit the books.

    And yeah tech support is a great use case and you can just use the Gemini links that send you to the Reddit threads where the information came from to verify it.

    I feel like if you’re minimally responsible it’s pretty hard to have AI backfire on you

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    That's cool. I did all of that without AI coming from a similar place as you. AI didn't open up a new path for you, it just showed you a path that already existed, which isn't any different from what a regular search engine can do. There was nothing stopping you from finding that path on your own except your unwillingness to look.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Willingness to look is a pretty important factor. LLMs reduce the personal cost incurred to look up information, similar to how search engines saved us from having to go to the library for every question we had.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    They also introduce much more uncertainty and remove your ability to judge the trustworthiness of the information you're receiving. That's not to mention the social and environmental costs.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    You could say the same about people who used the early 2000s Google by entering full questions with natural language and clicking "I'm feeling lucky". There are always going to be wrong ways to use a tool. But we're discussing whether there exists a right way. And that right way includes verifying the information you receive, just like you would if you found it through a regular search engine.

    The social and environmental costs are real. That's not the criticism you gave and not what the responses are disagreeing with.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    They presented to you a reasonable use case (assisted learning) and your response was "lol, you're just lazy. Do it on your own. I did it, so can you".

    I am in a similar position, networking is Martian to me and if I search guides on how to do stuff, it's full of people that go "just use X to do a reverse proxy", as if I have 200h of experience under my belt. I'd rather have a chatbot explain to me like I am 5 in some cases.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I don’t consider myself a “proponent” of ai and I think it gives dependent and lazy people brain damage lol

    But these people seem like complete contrarian Luddites who just want to insist it’s bad because they don’t like it and have seen too many negative memes about it

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago

    You are being lazy. If "I have to learn how to do this" is too high of a bar to clear for you then maybe you're just not supposed to do that thing. Setting up a self hosted environment is pointless if you don't know at the least the basics about how it works. It will break sooner or later and if you just typed whatever random characters your computer told you then you'll never be able to fix it. You won't even be able to describe to ChatGPT what the problem is.

    AI is making learning harder, not easier. It's flooding the internet with bullshit and you're acting like that's a good thing. When you're learning something new you need to know that your teacher knows what they're doing. An AI summary might be pulled from a network engineers blog or it might be the sanitized ramblings of a schizophrenic pedophile who tries to host CSM on his smart toaster. As a beginner, you can't tell the difference, especially when an AI rewrites the crazy and presents it in an authoritative manner.

    Yes, learning new things can be hard but the internet is already the shortcut. Quit trying to outsource even more of it.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (3 children)

    Did you pay for the AI service you used to do that and if it hadn't been available would you have just started reading the online resources the AI trained on and got to the same place eventually?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    No and no. The barrier to entry would have been too high. I don't have hundreds of hours to track down the answers I was looking for. It's not that I'm incapable of finding the information I was looking for in forums. It's that its such basic knowledge to most tech forum users that I probably would have been seen as a leech. Have you been to tech forums lately? Its a bunch up people telling you to be a better programmer and calling you a fucking idiot. That's why stack exchange is failing.

    Access to information should be free. That's partially why we're all here. Everything that we post could be scraped by an LLM and used for free. When it becomes an issue is when AI crawlers quadruple server load.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    So the fact you didn't pay kind of leads I to where I was going, that model isn't sustainable for AI, would you subscribe to get access to that information? How much would you pay? Because that is what those pushing AI want to happen, they want yo be the gatekeeper and you have to pay the toll to access information.

    As for the usefulness of AI for technical questions. Well I'm the other side of the learning curve from you, I need detailed answers to complicated technical questions and AI fails to provide a correct answer 9 times out of 10 and worse is misleading in its answers with basic mistakes or out of date information which would trip up inexperienced users or lead them into bad practices.

    It's only useful in giving me a direction to start, I still have to go to the likes of stack exchange and read and understand the primary sources it was trained on to get a useful answer and understanding. In general it saves me very little time and isn't that helpful.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    would you subscribe to get access?

    For the current quality of information? No. If the quality improves then maybe $5/mo. Purchase lifetime access with a guaranteed open source copy if they were to go bankrupt? Yeah. But for now, I get free access to ChatGPT for Teachers until like 2027.

    But even as of right now there's plenty of open sourced AI models. I just don't have the hardware to run complicated models efficiently. I don't game on a PC so my current setup is just an Intel 14100 and 32GB of ram. So if OpenAI decides to inject ads or force subscription on me, I'll just upgrade to a 14600F and get a 3060. Then its just a matter of deciding which open source LLM I like best.

    Well I'm the other side of the learning curve from you, I need detailed answers to complicated technical questions and AI fails to provide a correct answer 9 times out of 10 and worse is misleading in its answers with basic mistakes or out of date information which would trip up inexperienced users

    Sounds like you're probably doing that for a job and in which case I would strongly advise against AI reliance for work tasks. At least not without training it on your personal work or technical knowledge.

    It's only useful in giving me a direction to start, I still have to go to the likes of stack exchange and read and understand the primary sources it was trained on to get a useful answer and understanding.

    That's best practice when using AI output for more technical projects anyway. It probably isn't saving you much time because you're already proficient. In my case, it saved months of work. I see it as a tool that lowers the barrier of entry to a ton hobbies or areas of knowledge.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Doubt that'll happen for a few mor years unfortunately. I can't imagine most of the hardware made for AI datacenters is compatible with consumer stuff :/

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    I wonder how fast you could run Farcry on one of those AI GPU units.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Pretty sure MS will just seize the OpenAi data centers and repurpose them for Azure and rent out compute time or use it for XBox streaming. Non of the hardware will reach the open market.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Regardless of who owns it or what they do with it, those GPUs will get sold on the used market with plenty of life left. Older AI GPUs, networking equipment (eg 100GbE), SAS drives, etc have been easy to find on eBay and other sites for a long time, because data centers replace hardware long before it's expected to fail.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Exactly. They have like an 8 year depreciation, but they supposedly become obsolete in a couple of years for whatever cutting edge AI is supposed to be.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Even things like HDDs that don't become "obsolete" in 18-24 months get sold with plenty of life left (unplanned downtime is more expensive than new hardware), but obsolescence makes it happen even sooner.

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  • [–] 107 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    "market reaction suggests that more capital isn’t going to be a viable substitute for a business model anymore."

    Time to find the next vague thing that investors can pour trillions into without really knowing what it is or does.

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  • [–] 48 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    It'll be quantum computing. Since the last hype around it, a lot of progress has been made to the point that quantum computers are actually becoming useful, since error correction is now mostly resolved.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    The amount of cooling they need for a simple quantum CPU with 104 qubits. Can you even do anything with it that is useful, you can't even brake encryption because you don't have enough processing power.

    The science is advancing, but then as always is the question of, how you scale it to be economical viable, which is a hard problem by it self to solve.

    Don't think the market is interested in tech that they can't hype, or have a natural hype cycle.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Robotics. It will be a pivot to robotics.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    Challenge there being that seems to have proven elusive. It's not too surprising, but trying to use machine learning for robotics is actually really hard.

    Driving is much easier, training data with video, audio, and other sensor input complete with how the human manipulated steering and two pedals.

    But direct human interaction with the environment is both much more complicated than three controls and is not instrumented. They are trying to build training data from remote operators, but it turns out we aren't very good at controlling these things remotely anywhere close to acting directly. We are terrible teachers and there's a fraction of the actionable data that other more successful models had to work with.

    If an AI sees a video of someone doing something, it can make a similar video, but can't model how that might map to what it would see as unrelated motor and hydraulic operation.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Indeed. It will be a shitshow with all sorts of attempts to juice the share price via obfuscation of the actual abilities, like musk has been doing already. It won’t have many tangible outputs, but they’re desperate for the next big growth idea, so here we are.

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  • [–] 81 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    The real lesson here is that if you are a company that was founded on stupid imaginary bullshit your investors are comfortable with investing in stupid imaginary bullshit and it isn't going to hurt your price.

    When you are a legacy tech company whose investors expect you to actually make products that you sell for money, they don't like to hear that blew every penny you had on fucking magic beans.

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  • [–] 69 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I miss consistent weather.

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  • [–] 61 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    A company with a $3.2T market share. The game is made up and the points don't matter.

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    3.2 trillion is a stupid amount of money, but it isn't all liquid. A 440 billion dollar hit (nearly 14%) would be very, very bad for them.

    With the memory and SSD fiasco going on right now, fewer people are buying new PCs, which impacts their sales. Combined with the Windows 11 fiasco, the massive gaming division investments going nowhere, and the AI bubble, they're probably the most vulnerable they've been in decades.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    OEM license revenue represents a tiny tiny bit of their financials these days. They could just charge nothing for it and business wise no one probably notice much of a difference.

    It is foundational to a lot of what they do, but older devices are just as good for their subscription and tie in revenue. Hell I use my work subscription for office from Linux, complete with OneDrive filesystem synchronization. Microsoft gets all their money from my headcount even as I don't even use Windows.

    But that capex could bite them hard if revenue falls to follow from it. That's pretty much the only exposure investors care about.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    OEM licensing isn't the important part. It's everything that comes with it. Subscriptions, cloud storage, etc. In my city, a bunch of field workers are being moved from laptops to iPads and phones with the next hardware refresh due to the price jump in laptops. Microsoft won't have integrated Onedrive and SharePoint and full Office Subscriptions for them.

    We already use third-party web apps that aren't Microsoft (and are mostly hosted by AWS) for a lot of their work, so the only Microsoft product they'll have is an email address.

    Us abandoning the Windows laptops costs Microsoft hundreds a year per employee.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    When someone makes a better version of excel that's cross platform and not solely web based will be the final nail in the Microsoft coffin.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Not going to happen unfortunately. There have been so many challengers that have failed to usurp. And the bundling and ecosystem with sharepoint is a) exceptionally useful amd b) anticompetitive. It will take a serious legal case to dislodge excel

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    I am honestly surprised it never happened. Ma Bell got broken up in 1984, 6 years later Microsoft office is released, like 5 years later it has a dominant stranglehold. So in like a decade all of our consumer anti-trust power went away? Crazy.

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  • [–] 53 points 9 months ago

    Oh no....

    Anyway.

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  • [–] 43 points 9 months ago

    OpenAI has made about $1.4 trillion in commitments to procure both the energy and compute it needs to fuel its operations. But its revenue barely crossed $20 billion in 2025.

    Investors are increasingly critical of what they describe as “circular” deals involving the industry’s biggest players. On Wednesday evening, The Information reported that OpenAI is seeking a fresh $60 billion in funding from heavyweights like Nvidia and Amazon. However, market reaction suggests that more capital isn’t going to be a viable substitute for a business model anymore. “Maybe Oracle stock got way ahead of fundamentals, and now the market’s saying, ‘All right, show me, I want to see it,’” Eric Diton, president of the Wealth Alliance, told**Yahoo Finance.

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  • [–] 43 points 9 months ago

    and so it does

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  • [–] 33 points 9 months ago

    Wait.

    You mean that dedicating the majority of their business to buying things from themselves has not proven to be a sound strategy in the eyes of investors?

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  • [–] 32 points 9 months ago

    The AI ouroboros if finally consuming itself.

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  • [–] 29 points 9 months ago

    Sucks to suck

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago

    Looks like that magic well of social permission is about to dry up.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago

    owing to a slight miss on revenue

    Nope, try again.

    spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter ... approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI

    Ding ding ding! That's right, OpenAI, the company where being profitable is a physical and mathematical impossibility!

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago*

    I hope it burns. Altman can kick rocks.

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  • [–] 23 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    I hate AI...it never was AI. It was useless in all my tests.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    The gig was up for me when I tried to get it to play dungeon master in a game of DnD. It would start out great, but eventually it would forget what we were doing and instead of giving me choices it started just telling me the story of me playing dnd and it would stop giving me options. This would happen about 6 minutes into playing, or 3 or 4 "turns", and that's when I realized the incredible memory sync it is if it can't reference instructions given moments ago. A newer model won't fix that.

    At the end of the day it's complex predictive text that amounts to a Rorschach test.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    You need to do a custom program if you want to do that. I mean a traditional program where variables are stored properly.

    The models have no memory at all, at every question it starts from scratch, so the clients are just "pretending" it has a memory by simply including all previous questions and answers in your last query. You reply "ok", but the model is getting thousands of words with all the history.

    Because each question becomes exponentially expensive, at some point it starts to prune old stuff. It either truncates the content (for example the completely useless meta ai chatbot that WhatsApp forced down the throat loses context after 2-3 questions) or it uses the model itself to have a condensed resume of past interactions, but this is how it hallucinates.

    Otherwise it will cost like $1 per question and more

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    Which kind of illustrates the fundamental flaw right? Videogame companies have spent decades creating replayable DnD esc experiences that are far more memory efficient and cost effective. They already kind of do it the best way. AI can assist, and things like the machine learning behind the behaviors of the NPCs in Arc Raiders for example is very cool, but as you said, you need a custom program... which is what a video game is, so I guess my point is I don't see the appeal in re-inventing it through sort of automated reverse engineering.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    LLMs could theoretically give a game a lot more flexibility, by responding dynamically to player actions and creating custom dialogue, etc. but, as you say, it would work best as a module within an existing framework.

    I bet some of the big game dev companies are already experimenting with this, and in a few years (maybe a decade considering how long it takes to develop a AAA title these days) we will see RPGs with NPCs you can actually chat with, which remain in-character, and respond to what you do. Of course that would probably mean API calls to the publisher’s server where the custom models are run, with all of the downsides that entails.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    "we will see RPGs with NPCs you can actually chat with, which remain in-character, and respond to what you do"

    True, I think that's an actual advancement that will genuinely improve the experience. If we're ever going to get something like a holodeck it will take a clever combination of current and theoretical techniques, and generative ai will likely be a very big part of that.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (3 children)

    Off topic, but interesting username. Are you a fan? Wait, are you him?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Not him haha. Big fan indeed! He is an unclassifiable art man even within the super eclectic cinema landscape that are Korean movies.

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